Completely out of the blue Samsung has officially outed its next generation system-on-a-chip (SoC). The Exynos 4 Quad is very much what it sounds like: an updated version of the previous dual-core Exynos chip with four cores instead of two. Each core will be clocked to 1.4GHz, much like the last generation, and it is still going to be based on ARM's Cortex-A9 architecture.

I expected that Samsung would be moving to Cortex-A15 to more adequately compete with Snapdragon S4 and its Krait cores. Perhaps the 32nm manufacturing process, High-K Gate technology, dynamic voltage control, and advanced power management in the Exynos 4 Quad will make up for that. Samsung claims the Enynos 4 Quad will pack double the processing power (maybe a little simplistic core counting) while consuming 20% less battery.

Though we didn't realize it at the time, Meizu may have blown this announcement two weeks ago with the Meizu MX Quad-Core. This device was described at the time as running atop a quad-core Exynos chip at 32nm. That certainly sounds familiar, but there is still no confirmation on the model number of the Exynos 4 Quad. At the very least, the upcoming Next Galaxy announcement just got a lot more interesting.